Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Korean Study Hall: How I Learned to Read Hangul

As you know with any person who loves Kdrama as much as I do, your dream is to one day not need all of those subtitles. We all want to be able to speak/understand Korean so that we can visit South Korea, sing along to Kpop, and understand our Oppas without a translator.

As I journey, at a snails pace, towards fluency.... I will take you with me. I am going to share my tips, tricks and experience with you all. So come with me as I learn this beautiful language.

This past year I taught myself how to read Hangul. Which helps a lot.
Every once and a while I will recognize a phrase or word I know and I
get super pumped. I started simply. I just downloaded some apps and looked on Pinterest for ways to master reading Hangul. I figured if I could pronounce the alphabet easily, then I can use flashcards, videos and even books to proceed.

The first thing I found was how to read Hangul videos and Info-graphics. These are great if you are a strictly a visual learner. This info-graphic helped my friend Tashi learn in mere minutes. It didn't really help me any, but that doesn't mean it won't work for you!

Next up are the videos. Great if you are visual but need to hear it for complete understanding.

Since I am more of a "repeat-until-you-know-it and interactive learner" the videos did not work for me either. I decided to try out the appstore. There are a ton of crappy Hangul apps out there. Beware of the horrible ones with just text! I found one that is awesome for me.

Korean Letters Lite!

The app works with simple letters. You press on each letter and it pronounces it for you. Eventually the ways the letters are being shown to you becomes a little game an you are having fun learning Hangul. I still play this app, just to increase the speed at which I read or if I forget a letter.

It is available for both Android and iOS. Below are actual screenshots from the app.

I hope that this helps you as much as it helped me. You are well on your way towards reading Hangul!

3 comments:

I dream of the day I can watch Kdramas without the need of subtitles. To be an interactive learner you must watch videos with pen and paper in hand and the generous use of the pause button. SweetandTastytv.com with Professor Oh is great. She is on youtube. I also downloaded a free pdf version of basic-korean-a-grammar-and-workbook by Andrew Byon. You can find it here: http://culturequote.wordpress.com/korean/

I love SweetandTasty! She is pretty awesome. Videos never really work for me. I don't know what it is, I need more time than the video will allow and pausing it all the time drives me crazy. Her videos are great and i subscribe to her to keep up with everything she does. I really enjoy her series that explores Korea. She went to a Poo themed cafe once and a cat cafe. Man, I really need to learn Korean faster so that I can go there.